Marble is one of the oldest games in the world! This game is not only timeless, but also transgenerational with an international dimension. Despite their great age, marble games are still entertaining! Today's marbles have little to do with one of their ancestors, the game of "nut toss". Few people know it, but the marble is since 2012 an object listed in the inventory of French intangible cultural heritage! Indeed, there is a law in France that dates back to May 2, 1930 and allows for the protection of certain elements of intangible cultural heritage: the marble is one of them! More recently, in 2006, the French Ministry of Culture has been entrusted with a very particular mission to add the marbles to the ethnological heritage. What was thus the case in 2012. Everybody agrees to affirm that "marbles do not date from yesterday" since the first marbles started to be an object of entertainment for the children of Greek Antiquity. The majority of historians believe that antiquity begins in the second half of the 4th millennium B.C. (c. 3500-3000 B.C.) In other words marbles are very old ladies who deserve everyone's respect :) Today's marbles, in addition to being games for children, are also tested as play objects for these same children grown up. Thus, we find on beautiful trays often made of wood, which have hollow parts to accommodate the marbles: these notches allow to fix the marbles in a precise place and thus to avoid that they roll in all directions. This game is usually called "Chinese checkers". This marble game has nothing to do with its namesake, checkers. Although checkers is also played on a board, the checkers pieces are usually cylindrical and flat and are placed on a checkerboard. It is notable that checkers could, like Chinese marbles, be played on a board with a notch to stabilize the marbles; so that the tokens can be replaced by marbles. In short, the big difference between "checkers" and "Chinese checkers" comes from the very principle of the game. Checkers, whether played on a board of stable checkers or stabilized marbles, is a game played by two players. While Chinese checkers belongs to the large family of games called "solitaire": there is only one player who plays! A game of checkers is won when one of the two opponents has no more checkers (or marbles) on the board. A game of Chinese checkers is won when there is only one marble left on the board of the solitary player. Anyway, these games, when they are decorated with marbles, are also magnificent decorative objects. A marble board relegates the chess sets that we sometimes find as decoration on some shelves or coffee tables, to the rank of antique ... out of fashion. The game boards covered with marbles are all totally different from each other. Thus they are unique objects that honor the creative desires of the players who collect them. Another advantage is that it is very easy to change the marbles that make them up according to the fashions of the moment because every week we add new marbles to our site in bright, matte or shiny colors. No matter where your marble trays are placed, if you plan to change the paint on your walls, the color of your sofas or the decoration of your room, it will be very easy for you to change the marbles of your trays so that they coordinate perfectly with your new decorative desires !
